Guest Post: The Intimacy of Monsters by Hailey Piper

June 7, 2019

The Intimacy of Monsters

By Hailey Piper

I adore cosmic horror, but it isn’t what I
usually write. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve
penned a couple, but I’m happier leaving that scale of world-ending dread to
P.L. McMillan and Caitlin Kiernan. I
don’t connect the entropic, inevitable death of all things in a fearful
way. Cosmic horror delights me.

Personal horror gets under my skin. The little, everyday injustices and horrors
that are easy to miss. They could be
happening right next door. And through
those come the intimate monsters.

Personal ones.

When an intimate monster creeps into your
life, sometimes you aren’t even aware of what you’ve met. They might have been there all along. And if they get you, the world keeps
turning. An intimate monster can shatter
a life and if you’re lucky, at best someone might stop and look for a moment
before carrying on with theirs.

Those are the monsters I write, because
they reflect my experiences.

I remember reading an article, I don’t
know how long ago or where I found it, that talked about brainstorming monsters
by mashing together human and animal parts, different aspects and sizes. It reminded me of playing with the Creature
Creator in the 2007 PC game Spore.

Staring in confusion at my computer
screen, I said aloud, “What about the people who scare you?”

What about the boy at high school who
tried to set my hair on fire?

What about the man who cornered me near
the campus restrooms, his words praising me, his eyes and body language saying
other, scarier things?

What about my mother? When she finished shouting at me and my
siblings once, she said that wasn’t her who’d been shouting, but another woman
who looked like her, a woman who would come into our house. In the daylight, I rolled my
eyes—excuses. But at night, I worried
what would happen if that false mother came into our house while I slept.

The worst thing about intimate monsters is
when no one takes them seriously. When
we’re little, the monster under the bed is dismissed as imagination. “You’re just tired.” When we’re older, scary people are dismissed
just as easily. The person you’re trying
to tell might smile, make a distracting joke, but press the point and they’ll
turn away. They don’t want to know. I think every horror fan identifies with the
teenagers who try to warn parents or police about the Blob and Freddy Krueger,
but if it goes beyond identifying, blossoms into outrage? Then you’ve probably been there.

And if you insist, then
congratulations. Now you’re the
ghost. No one wants to see you if you
only want to tell them that polite, friendly person they know is actually a
monster. It reminds them that there is
horror happening everywhere. Someone you
look to as background characters in your life could be the monster of someone
else’s.

I don’t find the unstoppable force that
threatens our species a touchable monster.
Their carnage is too big. I’ve
seen weak monsters with ugly hearts, the ones that find someone vulnerable and
make their life miserable. Intimate
monsters; the ones I’ve met.

With Pride Month, I’m reminded how
listening and togetherness are the stakes and garlic and silver bullets against
intimate monsters. They can do what they
do because they do it in secret and often to one isolated person. When we’re open to each other, stand
together, intimate monsters have nothing.

For a while, I wasn’t sure anyone wanted
to hear about my intimate monsters. I
thought they would be seen as bothersome, the way bringing them up in real life
can be seen. I believed I was supposed
to streamline what I wrote, and because I didn’t know how to do that, I spent
years not writing.

“Write what you know.” I’ve seen this misconstrued as, “Only write
your areas of expertise” when really it means, “Write who you are.” There is no one else to tell those
stories. I took a long time to
understand that our every moment is a story, each memory a haunted house to be
explored.

It’s our personal horror that brings
authenticity to the stories we tell. The
box must be opened. I let out my
intimate monsters, the ones who aren’t in my life anymore, the ones who changed
into better people, the ones who are fusions of various predators I’ve
met. There’s significance to baring your
heart on the page. It’s been said that
no one else can write your weird; it’s all you.

I say the same of the intimate monsters. If there is a monster who has only been a monster to one person, that is the person in the world who knows that story. It’s one thing to face the dread that awaits us all, but it’s another to be personally haunted. All the people in the world, but they spent their horror on you. What could be more intimate than that?

About Hailey Piper

New York born and raised, now based in Maryland, Hailey Piper is a long-time writer and editor with a Bachelor’s in Literature and over a decade of experience as a professional proofreader and copy editor. On this site, you can find information on Hailey’s latest projects as they become available.